Sunday, March 21, 2010

Give Credit Where Due

She said it could be done when the White House was tempted to retreat with smaller, piecemeal reform. This was her victory.

For Every Winner, There is a Loser

"Health care now becomes a policy story rather than a legislative sausage-grinding story. Tales of death panels and warnings about losing your doctor can now be falsified. (That's what happened to the early scare stories about Social Security and Medicare.) And Republicans who denounce the program and promise to repeal it will no longer be bashing an abstraction. They will be proposing to take away existing, tangible benefits." - William Saletan, Slate

Signing the bill into law doesn't get Democrats out of midterm trouble. They will lose seats in 2010, there is no way around it. Without Obama himself on the ballot, the Democratic coalition is not going to show up at the polls as they would need to hold every seat. This is not just because the incumbent president's party has a history of midterm disadvantages. The very few people who regularly vote in midterms are older, whiter, and more affluent than the general population and likely voters in presidential election years. The exact opposite demographics of the coalition that elected President Obama. For the best predictions, I recommend following Charlie Cook and Larry Sabato for numbers.